There’s one question I feel like every high school student dreads being asked: what are you planning to do after you graduate? Like many young high school students, I went a long time without being able to come up with an answer for it.
It’s a question that haunted me all four years I was in high school. I was always considered the “smart one” out of my siblings, so it added even more pressure. All the adults in my life–from family members to family friends to teachers–were excited to know what bright future I had planned for myself after I received my high school diploma.
But the truth was… I didn’t know. I didn’t even have the slightest idea. As if that weren’t bad enough, COVID hit at the end of my junior year of high school. This not only killed my motivation to find a career, but put a severe strain on my overall mental health.
The reality was that by the time I graduated high school, I was in desperate need of a break. After discussing it with my parents, I did something that was considered one of the most risky things a recently graduated high school student could do… I took a gap year.
What is a ‘gap year’?
For those who might be unaware, “gap year” is a term that’s used to describe the process of taking a year off between graduating high school and starting college. Even with modern self-care culture becoming increasingly popular and more people advocating for healthy life balance and taking breaks for the sake of mental health, taking a gap year after high school is still considered something bad–something risky, something lazy, something that could jeopardize your success as an adult.
A lot of parents are strongly opposed to their children taking gap years. They fear that their child will lose all desire to become a productive, functional member of society and rot away in their basement for the rest of their lives. A lot of parents agree to a gap year only under the condition that their child still does something with that time–such as getting a job, or travelling somewhere new.
However, I became a parent’s worst nightmare. I took a gap year from high school, and I did absolutely nothing with it. I didn’t work, and I didn’t travel. In fact, I stayed home–ironically, mostly in the basement of my father’s house, where my bedroom was located–and I did a lot of what most people nowadays refer to as “bed rotting”.
And yet, to this day, I believe that was the best thing I ever did not only for my mental health, but for my education and my career.
Benefits to my mental health
Taking a gap year from high school gave me a lot of time to rest and recover from the strain of my last two years of high school. Even without a worldwide pandemic looming over my head, I had been working myself to the bone since middle school. I had always put a great amount of pressure on myself to be at the top of my class. While it did benefit me greatly–allowing me to remain in the Honors Program at my school as well as allowing me to graduate Cum Laude–it also burned me out like nothing else. By the time I graduated high school, I was honestly unsure that I had the remaining energy to be able to give my best in college academics.
This was one of the reasons why taking a gap year was so good for me. It allowed me to rest and enjoy things I liked without feeling like schoolwork was eating up all my free time. I was able to delve deeper into some of my hobbies I had neglected during high school due to lack of time–namely writing, reading, singing, and dancing–and derived a lot of fulfilment from being able to fill my day with things I enjoyed.
On top of that, I was able to do a lot of self-discovery. I finally started going to therapy and tried my best to work through a lot of my mental health issues that had been holding me back throughout my high school career. As a result, I was able to better myself. I started being able to figure myself out and find my identity–as much as an 18 to 19-year-old can, anyway–which not only grew my confidence but also reinvigorated my passion for life.
With the time I was able to dedicate to learning new self-care skills and improving my mindset, I learned how to stand up and advocate for myself, which is something I will need in my future career. I’m grateful I was able to get a head start on honing those abilities early, which prepared me to be able to tackle college and get the most out of my educational experience. Without that growth, I wouldn’t have been able to confidently pursue opportunities that have helped me grow in my career, such as working at my university’s writing center or taking on an internship while simultaneously being a full-time student and part-time employee.
Career clarity
Another thing that a gap year was able to help me with was deciding my career. When I graduated high school, I didn’t have the first idea of what I wanted to pursue as a job. I had cycled through many different options throughout the years that held and then promptly lost my interest–astronaut, pop star, and, more seriously at one point, a therapist. By the time I received my diploma, I had come up empty-handed.
Because having a year off gave me so much more new free time, I was able to dedicate more time to watching shows–namely, k-dramas. One such drama that I watched and loved was Romance Is A Bonus Book. This show was not just something to fill my time. It played an influential role in deciding what I wanted my career to be. The show follows a cast of characters who all work at a publishing company, and it showcases, in great detail, the process of bringing a novel from a manuscript to a released work.
Still shot from Romance Is a Bonus Book, IMDB
This showed me a career field I had never considered before, let alone knew existed. After doing some research, I found myself fascinated by the publishing industry, and was finally able to answer the dreaded question of what I wanted to pursue after my gap year was over: I wanted to become a publishing editor, and to do so, I needed a degree in English.
If I hadn’t gained all of that free time from my gap year, I might have never found the show that helped me figure out what I wanted to do moving forward. I may have ended up like countless other university students across America–lost, unmotivated, burnt out, stuck in a degree plan that I have no interest in–and eventually, I might have even joined the ranks of the 39% of undergraduate students that drop out of college before completing their degree.
Challenges I faced
Of course, some negatives came with taking time off from school. I became a little rusty with managing my time. When I did start back up in college, I struggled for the first couple of months to find a routine that helped me stay on top of my schoolwork and manage my free time effectively. In addition, I lost the ability to sit down and work on a singular task for a long period of time. I had to retrain my brain and build my attention span back up.
I also found myself becoming increasingly insecure about my decision. Seeing my friends that I graduated high school with go right into college and start achieving great things made me feel self-conscious. I often questioned if I was making the right choice. I still sometimes struggle with feeling behind, like my other peers who are my age and are so far ahead of me and are doing life “correctly” while I’m still stuck.
I’m currently twenty-two years old, and all of my classmates in my undergraduate classes are, on average, closer to twenty. I constantly feel simultaneously too mature for where I am as well as not mature enough. I’ve done a lot of emotional growth from when I was twenty years old, and yet I’m experiencing life for the first time with a group that is younger than me. I feel like I don’t quite fit in anywhere.
However, I often remind myself that life doesn’t have a set timeline. The age difference isn’t big enough to prevent me from making friends and connecting with my peers. All of the “negatives” I received from my gap year experience are all in my head, or reversible.
So I might be a little older than the average graduate by the time I complete my degree plan–who cares? What matters most is that I was able to find a path that worked for me and catapulted me into unprecedented growth and success that I never saw myself achieving, even if it’s not the most “conventional” one that is shoved into the minds of every American high schooler.
Statistics relating the benefits
In a survey conducted by the Gap Year Association in 2020, students reported a whole slew of benefits they received from taking a gap year after high school. 98% of students reported that it helped them increase their maturity, as well as a staggering 97% of students who reported increased levels of self-confidence. In addition, 84% of students reported an increase in academic motivation, despite the notion held by many that taking a gap year does the opposite.
81% of students said it influenced their choice of career, and 78% of students noted that it helped them choose what to study in college. This shows that the gap year was highly influential in guiding students to make solid choices regarding their futures.
Finally, even though many parents fear that kids who take a gap year will be unmotivated to return to higher education, a whopping 90% of students who take a gap year return to college after a year. Based on all this data, it’s hard to refute the benefits taking a gap year could provide for a student, both short term and in the long run.
Should you take a gap year?
Of course, like many things you find on the internet, you should take this advice with a grain of salt and consider it with your own understanding. For some people, going straight to college after graduating high school is the best course of action for them. Some people benefit from jumping right into the deep end and tackling their higher education head-on, and would genuinely lose their stamina to achieve greater things if they were to take a year-long break. My best friend, for example, went straight into college after high school, fast-tracked her undergraduate degree, and is now in grad school completing her master’s degree in astrophysics. She was able to find the path that worked best for her, and it happened to be the most conventional one.
But it’s important to remember that just because a path is the most conventional one doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right one. Society has a way of setting standards and timelines for people–often things that are perpetuated in popular media and culture–and then conflating that with some sort of moral standard. They insist that you have to go to college right away after high school or you have to go right into the workforce to be successful.
But sometimes you have to step back, look at these standards with a more objective eye, and realize that what works for most people might not work for you. And if you don’t yet know what works for you, you can take your time to figure it out.
I hope my story is able to at least showcase a different perspective on the concept of taking a gap year, and open up the minds of people who are staunchly against it by adding my voice to the numerous others who talk about why taking a gap year could possibly be the best decision you’ve ever made.
